Lost Boys: How Education Is Failing Young Working-Class Men

By Alex Blower

Book Overview

Since the mid-2000s, consistent commentary from politicians and media outlets in the UK have presented low educational attainment and low aspiration as defining attributes of working-class boys in education. It has often characterised them as misogynistic, aggressive and unwilling to learn. But how true is this?

Combining research, real-life case studies and the author's experience of navigating school exclusion, this book provides clear recommendations for how to better support the health, wellbeing and vulnerabilities of working-class boys and men through both policy and practice.

Challenging us to reconsider ideas about the role of masculinity in the lives of working-class boys and men, the book asks what would change if, instead of focusing on perceived individual failures, we considered the troubled relationship between working-class boys and the social and educational systems in which they reside.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1447370252
• ISBN13: 9781447370253
• Release Date: July 2025
• Publisher: Policy Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"